Is This Thing On?

Welcome to the new Kasabi blog! Kasabi is a new service under development at Talis. For the past 9 months we’ve been operating as a small start-up team incubated within the Talis Platform division. This is a model that Talis has successfully used before to explore new product and service options and one which I can testify makes for a very interesting and stimulating environment!

To date we’ve been a little coy about talking publicly about the service. Hjalmar Gislason graciously included us in his run down of emerging data marketplace services. Other than that though, our only presence has been the contact form on our homepage.

Expect this to begin changing over the next few weeks as we start to share more about what we’ve been building and the initial release of the service. Something which we’re very excited about.

Our focus for the last 6 months or so, apart from busily engineering the core service, has been to explore both the traditional and emerging business models around access to high quality data sources. We’ve watched with interest the rise of an increasing number of commercial data APIs; demands for developers for sustainable and reliable access to APIs; the launch of a number of similar services; and, importantly, talked with a wide range of organisations in the business of disseminating, licensing and providing access to data.

It’s also been clear to us for some time that the future lies in enabling developers to get ready access to both free and commercial data sources, as simply and easily as possible. We’re convinced that we’ve barely tapped the supply of potentially interesting data sets, many organisations, whether they consider themselves to be in the data supply business or not, have internal datasets that could be unlocked and used to drive innovation.

At its core Kasabi will be a data marketplace, but it will be much more than that. By leveraging the power of Linked Data and, perhaps more importantly, embracing the concept of shared innovation, we think we have something interesting and unique that will not only be fun to explore, but which we hope will generate real value for the whole ecosystem.

Stay tuned to this blog over the coming weeks to learn more about our thinking. We’ll be blogging about a whole range of topics including value networks; business models; the importance of contextualizing data; community curation of not just datasets but also APIs; emerging marketplace models; our technology, team, and a whole lot more.

[…] and background: A stealth mode project by UK based software company Talis. Early this year, they started a blog, and according to the information published there, they plan a launch – at least a closed […]